I had never heard the term before the WaPo’s Jose Antonio Vargas credited it with swinging the Virginia Democratic primary for governor in favor of Creigh Deeds: Starting at 3 p.m EST Monday, hours before polls opened across Virginia, Deeds’s campaign bought what’s called a “Google blast.” Or, more appropriately, a Google attack. If you live in Northern Virginia (or, like many voters, work in D.C. but live in NoVa), Deeds has been almost inescapable on highly-trafficked...

TMZ broke the story this afternoon: We’ve learned “biblically correct” Carrie Prejean will lose her Miss California USA crown today because she doesn’t play well with others. … Carrie is getting her walking papers this afternoon. They were right. Donald Trump is quoted in the NYTimes story: I told Carrie she needed to get back to work and honor her contract The National Organization for Marriage stands by their spokesmodel: “Hollywood hates Carrie. First they abuse...

Now that Adam Lambert’s made it official, it’s looking like the traditional media may move on to fretting over how his drug admissions will influence our children. A child of the sixties myself, you won’t find me concerned with that. Instead, I will revel in how much America loves their Idol runner up. Here are two takes on the Kris Allen/Adam Lambert bromance. Both were written prior to Lambert’s Rolling Stone admissions. First, from Ken Tucker on Fresh Air : [Adam Lambert]...

The BBC Headline, Twitter hype punctured by study: Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found. Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network. However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days. And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found. The Chronicle’s...

Brilliant! A win for Colbert. A win for the troops. A win for Obama. Sincerely Stephen: Mr. Colbert’s entire career is based on being gleefully insincere, a man who literally wraps himself in the flag to the screaming of majestic computer-generated eagles. On the other hand he is unquestionably a real supporter of the troops, raising money through donorschoose.org for school supplies for children of soldiers, through his WristStrong bracelets for the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps injured veterans,...

WCVB-TV: The Boston Newspaper Guild rejected the contract negotiated after the Globe’s parent company, the New York Times Co., said it needed $20 million in annual savings from Globe unions – half of that from the Guild – to avoid shutting down the 137-year-old newspaper. The Times Co. had said if the contract were rejected, it would try to impose a 23 percent wage cut. It also could follow through on its threat to close the Globe, which would require giving 60 days notice to the...

The NYTimes alert: In a stunning reversal, the Democratic majority in the New York State Senate appeared to lose control of the chamber Monday afternoon when two senators broke party ranks to back a Republican motion to displace the Democrats as the party in control. The motion appeared to pass, 32-30, despite procedural moves to block it. The NYTimes City Room blog fills in details of a raucous leadership fight that erupted on the floor of the state Senate around 3 p.m. after the two New York City...

Bloomberg: The rebuff spares President Barack Obama’s administration from the awkward task of mounting a legal defense for a policy the president says should be repealed. In urging the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal, administration lawyers said a lower court was correct to uphold the policy. The high court case stemmed from a lawsuit by 12 former service members who were discharged because of their sexual orientation. A federal appeals court in Boston threw out the suit, disagreeing with...

NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a piece tonight about the Gay Marriage battle in Washington, D.C.,  where the city council passed a measure that would allow the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Supporters are hoping the council will pass new legislation allowing same-sex marriage in the district. Meanwhile, somewhat incongruously, in the Weddings/Celebration section of today’s NYTimes there’s a discussion of same sex divorce. Not all that...

KevinMD: How are American doctors fighting medical tourism trend? Cardiologist DrRich’s latest post details the concern the American College of Surgeons have for the burgeoning medical tourism industry, and how they are using malpractice as a reason not to travel overseas for your procedure. “Indeed, the potential difficulty in suing foreign doctors appears to be the chief differentiator, and the primary argument in favor of good-old-American-surgery,” DrRich write. “The surgeons, in essence,...

Yesterday afternoon Jason Bellini of The Daily Beast said that gay rights leaders had made a deal to wait on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. He said that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “let slip” to a number of gay leaders that the Human Rights Campaign told him that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not the White House’s priority: Last night Andy Towle got another statement from HRC denying the report: “This story is not only an outright lie, it...

From Fox, “a matrimonial reality series,” I Married a Stranger: The premise of the show is that a woman frustrated by the dating scene agrees to wed a man she’s never met. While she prepares for her blind wedding, friends and family select a spouse from a pool of six eligible suitors offered by the show’s producers. The men are eliminated one by one until only two candidates remain. Both finalists walk down the aisle, but only one makes it to the altar to reveal himself to...

Twitter haters beware. Steven Berlin Johnson’s Time cover story, How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live, says Twitter’s key elements — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — are here to stay. And every major channel of information will be “Twitterfied” in one way or another in the coming years. Then there’s this: When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns...

It’s pretty clear how he died: ACTOR David Carradine, star of the Kill Bill movies and and Kung Fu TV series, has been found dead naked after reports claiming an apparent sex act went wrong – similar to how INXS singer Michael Hutchence died. Dan Savage: When the news first broke, no one hesitated to label Carradine a suicide. Now that more info has emerged and it seems clear that Carradine died during “an erotic asphyxiation act”…people are saying it’s rude to...

That’s the AJC headline on a story about an appearance by retiring chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears, at the Atlanta Press Club Tuesday: Asked whether the U.S. Constitution would require Georgians to recognize the marriages of gay Iowans if they moved to the state, she first deferred to a lesser document: The state constitution banned gay marriage in 2004. Pressed on whether the federal parchment —- which says states will accept public acts, records and judicial...

A friend, family really, the sister of my life-partner who passed from AIDS in 1988, writes: What a wonderful victory in NH today!!!  I am so proud of our state for supporting equal rights! Indeed: Gay marriage legislation became law in New Hampshire this afternoon. Gov. John Lynch signed the bills just after 5:20 p.m. before dozens of enthusiastic supporters of same-sex marriage. New Hampshire’s law takes effect Jan. 1. Rev. Gene Robinson, Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, the church’s...

Maybe. Maybe not: [I]t is…pretty clear that Cheney was talking about a “shot” at seeking marriage equality in their state, which everyone has, rather than a “shot” at marriage equality itself, which most people don’t have currently. This much is clear: Cheney is more progressive than Obama on marriage equality, because he does not — and has never in the past decade — said that he believes marriage should be limited to one man and one woman.  Obama has.  That is not a development…that...

In a NYTimes OpEd Barr says: THERE is no abuse of government power more egregious than executing an innocent man. But that is exactly what may happen if the United States Supreme Court fails to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis. … I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional. Just...

Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington says Apparently Bing Is Something Of A Hit: Last week everyone got to see the demo video and a few of us were actually able to access Bing for our reviews. Most everyone, though, just had to wait to actually try the service. Initial reader comments tended towards the negative on announcement day. Microsoft got heat for having nothing but a landing page up (and not even that for a while after the announcement). The “Bing stands for But It’s Not Google”...

Significantly: The vote on Senate Bill 283 came following a dramatic speech by state Sen. Dennis Nolan, R-Las Vegas, who said he had received many vulgar and even threatening calls from people who demanded that he vote against the bill. Those kinds of calls do not mesh with “the Christian beliefs I was brought up with,” Nolan said. Emphasis mine. Via Towleroad.

“It was a mystery to me that Al Gore never talked about food because what happens on your plate represents your most important engagement with the natural world and the biggest impact you have on climate change.” Michael Pollan on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Michael Arrington summarizes the evolution of search: Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web. When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all up nicely in 2005 “In this new world,...

With the Sonia Sotomayor pick set to be announced, now we wait for the California Supremes’ decision on Prop 8. The Los Angeles Times has a Q&A on the latter: The state’s top court will rule on whether to uphold or strike down Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The justices will also decide whether the state will continue to recognize the estimated 18,000 same-sex marriages carried out in 2008. I’ll be most interested to watch how these two...

While on the topic of closed car lots, I have to say I’m surprised at the speed with which Americans have gone from loving their SUVs, pick-up trucks and Hummers to declaring our auto industry obviously bloated, inefficient and to be building vehicles that nobody wants. Ralph Nader began his testy relationship with the auto industry in a 1959 article, “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy.” Today Nader says Congress should intervene in the auto industry bailout: “The government-led...

The Chronicle: Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, has revoked its recognition of the student Democratic Party club, reports The News & Advance, in Lynchburg, Va. The university had officially recognized the group in October. The club’s president, Brian Diaz, received an e-mail message last week from the university’s vice president for student affairs, telling him that the club must stop using Liberty’s name and holding or advertising...